AI Leadership Will Determine Geopolitical Leadership, Says Mary Meeker's AI Trends Report

Mary Meeker, often dubbed the 'Queen of the Internet', released her recent report on artificial intelligence trends last week. The report talks about the unprecedented transformation in AI around the world, specifically in leading names such as ChatGPT.

US-based Meeker is a tech investor and analyst who has successfully predicted many of the trends in the internet space during her career, since 1995. She is a general partner at investment firm BOND and serves on the boards of large technology firms. The report, titled Trends—Artificial Intelligence, released on May 30, was authored by Meeker, Jay Simons, Daegwon Chae and Alexander Krey.

"OpenAI’s ChatGPT – based on user/usage/monetisation metrics – is history’s biggest ‘overnight’ success (nine years post-founding)," the report says.

While the first iteration of the internet, or internet 1.0, first grew in the United States of America and then diffused throughout the whole world, ChatGPT has been a global phenomenon at the same time.

Platform incumbents and emerging challengers are racing to build and deploy the next layers of AI infrastructure, the report says. This includes agentic interfaces, enterprise copilots, real-world autonomous systems, and sovereign models.

"Rapid advances in artificial intelligence, compute infrastructure, and global connectivity are fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how capital is deployed, and how leadership is defined – across both companies and countries," the trends suggest.

Much like the space race, the current global competition in AI is being driven by highly capable people around the world, which will ensure there is just progress. The world’s most powerful countries are revved up by varying degrees of economic, societal and territorial aspiration, the report noted.

"The reality is AI leadership could beget geopolitical leadership – and not vice versa," the report says.

Meeker and her colleagues are also careful to highlight that while the promise of AI innovation is incredible, these are also "dangerous and uncertain" times. Still, there is reason to be optimistic about the future.

The authors believe that intense competition and innovation, increasingly accessible compute, rapidly rising global adoption of AI-infused technology and thoughtful and calculated leadership can foster sufficient trepidation and respect.

"...that in turn, could lead to Mutually Assured Deterrence."

Interestingly, India entered the global pecking order of the world's 30 most valuable tech companies, with one entrant in 2025. According to the report, Reliance's telecom arm Jio is among these companies, at number 23 with a market capitalisation of $216 billion.

India also had the world's largest number of people using the ChatGPT mobile app, with a share of 14% this year, till April 2025. When it came to China's DeepSeek AI mobile app, India was the third largest in terms of monthly active users, accounting for 6.9% of the global share of users.